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An Alvey survey: Advanced information technology in the U.K.
An Alvey Survey: Adv ed Info ation Technology in the U.K. A I T is a serious object of Governmental concern in the U.K. This survey shows how.
1. Introduction As was the case for similar initiatives elsewhere, the catalyst for Great Britain,s new information technology research policy arrived in an innocuous enough form: an invitation to attend the symposium in Japan in October 1981 on Japan's FGCS project. A team o f scientists and government officials, led by the head of the information technology division of the Department of Industry, attended this symposium. Upon their return, the UK delegation expressed their reactions to what they had seen and heard in no uncertain terms: what the Japanese were planning to undertake constituted a major competitive threat to industry in the UK and elsewhere. The scale and cohesiveness of the FGCS programme outlined was impressive. Moreover, the team felt that other nations, led by the US, would respond to this challenge, creating an equal if not greater degree of competition for UK industry. T h e delegation reported their findings to a conference in London in January 1982 which was attended by a representative cross-section of industrialists and other experts. Nor were the conference participants insensitive to the delegates' message: an urgent study was called for to investigate the opportunities for and obstacles in the way of cooperative research efforts in information technology in the UK, and a programme of action was outlined, organised by a group assembled by the Science and Engineering Research Council (SERC). A twelve-member committee made up of representatives of the major British computer companies (e.g., General Electric Co. (GEC) of London, Plessey Co., Ltd, International Computers Ltd. (ICL)) plus participants from the Ministry of Defense and SERC, was appointed by the Department of Industry. Chaired by J o h n Alvey, a man with an impressive scientific North-Holland
career i n government research institutes who has since become Director of Research at British Telecom, the Committee was charged with undertaking this study.
2. The Alvey Report Their conclusions became the Alvey Report, a 70page document presented to Kenneth Baker, the Minister for Technology, in August 1982 and subsequently presented to and accepted by the House of Commons on 28 April 1983. It r e c o m m e n d e d a cooperative programme of research involving all sections of British information technology. Among its recommendations were: • to establish a national programme for advanced Information Technology (IT) research to cost £350 million over five years. Two-thirds of the direct costs of this programme were to be borne by the government, with industry providing the remainder (Costs of implementing research results as marketable products were to be borne solely by industry.); • tO encourage collaborative efforts between industry, the academic sector, and other research organisati0ns, with a view to the widest possible exploitation of the research results; • to distribute funding in the following way: £57 million would go to support research and training in academic institutions. This support would be 100% government-funded. The rest of the research would be carried out by industry, and those projects with wide applicability were to receive 90% government funding, with other projects receiving 50% (This proposal was later rejected by the Thatcher government, which felt that there would be greater likelihood of exploitation if all industrial research were funded on a 50-50 basis. Academic research did receive 100% funding, however.); FGCSI 69
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• to focus on four key "enabling technologies": Software Engineering, Very Large Scale Integration (VSLI), Man-Machine Interfaces (MMI), and Intelligent Knowledge Based Systems (IKBS) (These four enabling technologies will be elaborated upon below.); • to focus on pre-competitive activities, i.e., basic research and the design of tools and a communication infrastructure to link researchers. "Capability demonstrators" should be emphasized to test the emerging technology and assess its potential commercial application (Although not specifically identified as such in the Alvey Report, the infrastructure and communications aspects have been recognised as sufficiently important to merit the status of a fifth area of activity, including research, and are likewise treated below.); • to emphasize education and training to provide h u m a n resources to mount the technical programmes, particularly in IKBS, but also in software and MMI; • to operate the programme as a UK effort. Participation by non-UK multinationals should be permitted only when they are able to contribute a particular asset to the programme, where the results of their involvement will be available to benefit UK industry as a whole, and where the relevant technical information will not leak from the UK. Full exploitation by UK industry should be encouraged and at as early a stage as possible; • to establish a Directorate within the Department of Industry to implement the programme. Headed by a Director who is accountable for his broad strategy and overall operations via DOI control machinery, the Directorate should nonetheless have the necessary powers to act speedily and flexibly (The Alvey Directorate is likewise dealt with at greater length below). The Alvey Report was widely circulated in the UK and its arguments found general approval and acceptance within British industry, without doubt eager for a solution to the problems of their eroding markets and aware of the potential offered by Information Technology. As the Alvey Report itself cites, current growth in the area on the world market is in the order of 10 percent per annum. T h e authors Of the report go on to say: "The issue before us is stark. We can either seek to be at the leadingedge of these technologies; or we can aim to rely upon imported technology; or we can opt out of the race. The latter we do not regard as a valid option. Nor is reliance upon imported technology practical as a 701 FGCS
general strategy, though we cannot be completely self-reliant either. "The only sensible option, in our view, is to share in the future growth and development of the world IT sector, by building up our technological strengths in specific targetted priority areas, which will maximise our prospects of exploiting the opportunities available".
3. The Alvey Directorate Based on the assumption that any research would be done by organisations capable of using and exploiting the results, the authors of the Alvey Report recommended that the Directorate overseeing the programme be limited in size to about 15 members to avoidthe unwieldiness of a top-heavy organisation. It was expected that the programme would be executed through other organisations~ The Programme Director was to be someone with a proven track record for programme management in information technology, with a demonstrated ability to work with and through a wide range of other organisafions. The Alvey Report recommended that the P r o g r a m m e Director be given a fixed term contract for five years and that his position be graded sufficiently high to permit him direct access to Ministers. The position of Director o f the Alvey Programme was assumed by the former Director ofSERC i n J u n e 1983. He is accountable to a Steering Committee to which his overall strategy and plans are submitted for approval. Assisting him is the Deputy Director, four division Directors and two more Directors, in charge of Administration and for Infrastructure and Communications. These Directors are "on loan" from the institutions by which they are employed, and their salaries are paid by these organisations. The responsibilities of the Alvey Directorate include drawing up contract specifications and awarding contracts, arranging for the monitoring of projects, dissemination of the results to promote commercial exploitation as quickly and as competitively as possible.
4. The Enabling Technologies Enabling technologies are the priority areas identified by the Alvey Report which are considered neccessary for managing the growing complexity of future I T products and handling the highly complex interactions which will be required of future computing systems. As mentioned above, four main enabling technologies are seen as essential to progress in the North-Holland
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field (Table 1). Although these areas overlap in many ways, for the purposes of simplification and organisation, they are treated as separate units within the Alvey strategy documents and are superficially organised as separate elements within the Alvey Programme.
Table l 1. So]-tware Engineenng, the efficient specification and generation of the instructions for the machines of the future. 2. Man-Machine Inter]aces. It is felt that commercial success will come to those developers who make a point of ensuring that their complex (or simple) products are acceptable to their users. Interface instruments include visual, speech and touch input/output devices. 3. Intelligent Knowledge Based Systems. More powerful information processing systems featuring more effective transfer of human intelligence and knowledge to the computer are emphasized, as are computer systemsthat are easier to build and to use. 4 VLS1 developments. Very Large Scale Integration of circuits on silicon will be the basis for the hardware which requires the efficient interconnection of very large numbers of logic elements.
4.1 SoftwareEngineering Acknowledging the fact that "the UK is good at software but must develop better tools if it is to stay competitive", the Alvey Report goes on to state the goal of this programme in terms which are as unclouded as they are ambitious: "The strategic objective proposed in this area is that the UK should become a world leader in this Software Engineering technology by the end of the 80s". T h e Strategy Overview for the programme puts it this way: "The programme will set out to establish tools and methods necessary for the production of high quality, cost effect software of world-leading standard". T h e long-term objective of the Software Engineering Programme is the development of Information Systems Factories (ISF) by the end of the 1980s. ISF is defined in the Alvey Report as "a computer system, both hardware and software, which provides an integrated set of tools for producing IT systems using software engineering techniques .... IT systems produced through the ISFs will meet the parallel requirements of efficient production and operation, of improved reliability and performance, which the competitive market of the 1990s will impose. An ISF will contain subsystems for specification and prototyping, to ensure the cornNorth-Holland
pleteness and consistency of systems design and leading to automatic software p ~ u c t i o n ; programming support, based on a methodology for the entire life-cycle of systems development; computer-aided design for VLSI; a database or knowledge base of available, reusable hardware and software components, communications facilities to link collaborative development teams on both local and wide area networks". T h e Software Engineering Programme emphasises three areas of activity: the rapid exploitation of mature formal methods, the industrialisation of promising methods so that they can be exploited in the near future, and fundamental research to provide more powerful methods in the long term. The two major goals identified in the Alvey Software Engineering Programme Strategy are: • improved quality, i.e,, satisfying criteria such as performance, reliability, security, on-schedule delivery, and meeting the needs to the user; • increased productivity, i.e. reducing cost, not just of the development, but of the lifecycle as a whole, including maintenance and future evolution. The demand for reliable software, defined as the probability of failure-free operation for a given time period in a specific environment, has increased and will continue to increase as companies which are prepared to provide warranties on their software gain competitive advantages. There may be serious repercussions to the use of inadequately designed software, such as the failure of large firms as a result of unreliable business software or loss of life due to software failures in avionic systems or major chemical processing plants. These kinds o f failures could bring about massive public reactions against the use of computers, in the opinion of the Alvey Directorate, which could have very serious consequences for all industrialised countries. T h e old ad hoc methods of producing applicationspecific software must be changed if the demand for software is to be met. This demand calls for an acceleration of research activities and of the evaluation and real-life application of research results. It is expected that there will be a close interrelationship between the evaluation and production steps in the Software Engineering Programme, with, for example, the results of technique evaluation being fed back into the development of handbooks to guide production and management; and cost and quality considerations and model validation exercises will refine the original models of reliability and the development process. There appears to be a strong degree of agreement FGCSI 71
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between industry, government, and 'the academic community regarding the m a i n directions the programme should follow. These are:
Exploitation It is generally agreed that software quality and productivity can be improved in the short term by encouraging acceptance and use of tools available now, such as data dictionary systems, test harnesses, project databases, etc. This can be encouraged by the application of appropriate standards to tools, the investment of capital for equipment and training, and the education of both management and software staff.
Integration Project Support Environments (PSE) must be inte-. grated to contain a compatible'set of specification, design, programming, building, and testing tools supporting a development methodology that covers the entire life cycle, together with management control tools and procedures, all using a coordinated and consistent project database. A fully integrated PSE is the Information Systems Factory, the focus of this programme, which is a long-term objectiveexpected not earlier than the end of the decade.
Innovation Although it is impossible to specify now what kinds of approaches will be selected for support and eventual testing on life-size projects, it seems likely that successful approaches will possess the following: • formal, rigorous methods of specification of requirements and techniques to express designs and determine how far they meet their specifications; • methods of structuring software or hardware system components for wide reuse; • methods of measuring and predicting levels of productivity and quality, particularly reliability; • potential for examination of the software production process in its industrial context so that this process can be better described and modelled and can provide a sound basis for the construction of advanced management tools and techniques. The Software Engineering Programme will increasingly cooperate with and integrate aspects of the other main Al,~ey strategy areas, in particular CAD for VLSI, high resolution displays (MMI), and expert systems (IKBS).
4.2 Man-Machine Interfaces (MMI) Deliberately selecting an acronym to represent it which encompasses both the concept of Man-Machi72 I FGCS
ne Interaction and of Man-Machine Interfaces, the Alvey MMI programme is based on the notion that, as the Alvey Report puts it, "commercial success will come to those who are making sophisticated products truly acceptable to their users". Major areas of focus within the programme will be Human Interface and Displays; the programme will also focus on technologies that support the user interface, including image analysis and speech processing, grouped in MMI documents under the term "Pattern Analysis". MMI work will be done by researchers from many fields, including psychology, mathematics, organisational theory, and computer science. These researchers will be charged with identifying the needs, conventions and skills in successful human communications, as well as the modes (text, speech, images, etc.) which are most effective in user interfaces. In order to design systems which operate as effective consultants or tutors, attempts will be made to determine what makes human experts effective at communicating their expertise. Within the programme, the intention is to deemphasize physical ergonomics. According to Chris Barrow, MMI Director, it is generally felt that adequate research has been done in the past in this area, and that cognitive ergonomics must be stressed instead. Among other techniques, this will be done by constructing "models of users" and by quantifying the success of systems by, e.g., measuring user error rates. "Most systems in the past have been menudriven, with the computer asking the questions; new systems will use a conversational mode, with humans asking the questions", Barrow said. "Many companies in the past supplied equipment, the consequences of which they had no idea, but this is changing. As an example of good coming from evil, the Three-Mile Island disaster did a great deal to boost this field, by drawing attention to the questions of social liability". It is not, however, the intention of the Alvey MMI Programme to deal with larger social issues, such as effects on employment; instead it is hoped that the European Economic Community's ESPRIT programme will focus some attention on these questions. The objectives of the MMI programme are "to raise the level of UK user interface design, in terms of innovation and design methodology, so that the industry can compete effectively in world markets, and to improve UK capabilities in pattern analysis to make possible the use of advanced speech and image techniques in the user interface. For Human Interface, the key areas of work as identified in the MMI Strategy Document are given here in Table 2. North-Holland
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Table 2 User Interface design
• Interactive techniques (especially ways of using new workstation architectures and input devices): • Interface to IKBS (both for the end user and for the interface between the expert and the knowledge base); • Exemplar projects (or projects demonstrating the use of MMI in specific applications); • Integrating methods for combining two or more applications of interactive capabilities; and • Technology evaluation, including analysisof alternative hardware and software architectures for interactive systems. Human Factors
• Cognitive processes of the individual IT user; • Evaluation techniques for objective measurement of human-computer performance (such as the measurement of error rates mentioned above); • UsabiIitycharacterstics and determinants (such as training, environment, hardware and software design and user support); • Person-to-Person interaction via advanced IT; and • Organisational consequences of IT (i.e., the tools and techniques for facilitating and evaluating the use of IT by groups of users. Computer conferencing systemslike the COM system developed at Stockholm University have yielded valuable experience in this area.) Design Methodology
• Use of models in MMI design, including user's models, models of application environments, systemarchitecture models, etc.; • Design tools and techniques for simulation and evaluation; • Design guidelines and procedures for hardware and software construction and for the application of human factor research; • The design process,or investigating methods of improving the MMI design process; and • Design case studies and worked examples.
MMI research in the area of displays, an important field which has not been dealt with in the ESPRIT programme plans, will focus primarily on developing flat-panel displays meeting industry's requirements for high-volume interactive products. These requirements will include low cost, large area (at least A4) and high resolution range, as well as interactive properties. Investigation of integrated input devices (e.g. touch sensitivity) will also be explored. Pattern Analysis, including speech and image processing, provides the technologies for translation between human-oriented representations of data (text, pictures, speech, etc.) and machine-oriented North-Holland
representations, opening up new approaches to human-computer interaction. Research into image processing will include image enhancement, motion analysis, image parametrisation (obtaining characterisations of the local shape of grey-level surfaces, multi-sensor fusion, optimisation of hierarchy design. Speech processing research will include speech recognition and speech synthesis. As the objectives of the Alvey Programme in general stress the exploitability of products, it has been recognized that much MMI work will have to be application-specific. Likely key market areas include office automation, factory automation, computer aided design (CAD), process control, and software engineering, Regarding the relative general commercial exploitability of the MMI programme, a recent Alvey-sponsored survey of 110 major IT companies in the UK in both defense and nondefense work identified about 650 researchers in MMI areas. IN UK universities, there are a number of bodies which fund work in their own particular area of MMI. Previous to the establishment of the Alvey MMI programme, few opportunities existed to mount multi-disciplinary projects and to achieve cross-fertilisation or avoid duplication. It is felt that the MMI programme will bring about a muchneeded degree of coordination and that MMI experience will become increasingly valuable as competition for IT products increases.
4.3 Intelligent Knowledge Based Systems (IKBS) IKBS is defined in the IKBS Architecture Study as "semi-intelligent systems for carrying out a single complex task. This implies w o r k i n g with a large, incomplete, uncer~in, and rapidly changing knowledge store, use of inferential procedures for applying this knowledge in reacting to varied and unreliable inputs in a changing environment, and the use of sophisticated and flexible control mechanisms". Sometimes described by insiders as a kind of euphemism for artificial intelligence and expert systems, IKBS may be applicable in areas of human thought and activity ranging from medical diagnosis to complex engineering design, from oil technology to agriculture, from military strategy to citizen's advice. Envisioned by the authors o f the Alvey Report as consisting of a user interface connected by an inference engine to a knowledge base, with the entire structure supported by an appropriate virtual machine, other areas of potential application include scientific diagnosis, database questioning, teaching FGCSI 73
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basic skills, document retrieval, office scheduling, robot management, picture matching, message interpretation, p r o g r a m m e drafting, technical manual production, industrial process control and warehouse packing. The study upon which the programme is based was prepared by a Study Group jointly sponsored by the Department of Industry and the Science and Engineering Research Council u n d e r the Chaimanship of J o h n Taylor of the Admiralty Surface Weapons Establishment. Carried out over a period of six months by a team of researchers from universities, industry a n d government laboratories, the study resulted in a report which proposed an IKBS programme u n d e r three main headings: (1) Research and Development (dealt with below), (2) Awareness and Marketing, and (3) Infrastructure. Preliminary budgetary estimates indicate that a programme o f the scale described would cost some £30 million over five years. T h e Research and Development component is subdivided into five subheadings: • "Show me" projects: demonstrations of existing IKBS technology; • Short-term development projects: to produce marketable products in three to four years; • D e m o n s t r a t o r projects: complete prototype systems embodying new research results; • Research themes: long-term directed research on selected topics o f importance to future IKBS technology; • General research: portfolio of quality, speculative research proposals. A start has been made in searching within UK industry for suitable "Show Me" projects. Suitable projects will be used as case studies in the Awareness Programme. Recognising the lack of manpower in the area, the Alvey IKBS Programme will focus considerable attention on training and attracting people to IKBS-related fields. It has been estimated that the n u m b e r o f individuals dedicated to research in this area will have to be tripled. Because o f this shortage, more demonstrator projects are presently being f u n d e d or considered for funding than applications or research projects at the m o m e n t within the IKBS programme. T h e more concrete demonstrator projects, which involve industry-led collaborative R & D, are aimed at building complete prototypes of possible future systems requiring substantial R & D progress. It is hoped that individuals who are currently in I T applications or are still studying will be sufficiently attracted by the notions, represented in the demonstrations to enter research. 74 I FGCS
Nine major research themes have been oudined as medium to long-term directed research goals (see Table 3). Other critical areas which will receive attention within the IKBS programme include programming languages and hardware standards.
Table 3 1. Declarativelanguages (or languagesin whichthe pro~ gramme is a description of the result rather than a s~cification of the steps to be performed to calculateit): 2. 16aralletarchitectures; 3. Intelligentdatabase systems; (These three themes taken together will provide the basis for what is most frequendy compared with the Japanese Fifth Generation Coml~uterSystem) 4. Expert systems; 5. InieUigentfront ends 6. Inference: 7. Natural language; 8. Image interpretation; 9. IntelligentComputer-aidedinstruction
4.4 VLSI Developments Very large scale integration is seen as vital to the development of advanced IT products. T h e Alvey VLSI programme will focus a great deal o f attention on the use of computer-aided design (CAD) to design advanced circuits, making the development of improved CAD tools a major part of the programme. The development of these tools and VLSI techniques are and will be increasingly interrelated, and the Alvey Report sees the development o f VLSI technology as crucial to the evolution of all the other recommended technologies: speech and picture processing for man/machine interfaces and advanced processors for intelligent knowledge-based systems. Other interrelationships in the programme likewise become obvious; for example, the ability to build in knowledge will create the need for larger and faster systems which will in turn create a d e m a n d for software engineering, and so on. The objective of the programme is to advance British VLSI technology to the point that it will be possible to manufacture and test silicon chips that are approximately one centimeter square and contain approximately one million logic gates capable of one nanosecond switching delays by the end of the decade. It is expected that the project goal will be achieved in steps with, for example, 1.5 micron geometry circuits designed as an intermediate product, within the first two years. Chip demonstrators, North-Holland
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selected on basis of their applicability to IT products, will be created during the course of the programme to illustrate the advances in VSLI technology and CAD tools. Fabrication processes being considered for support within the Alvey Programme include: • A basic CMOS process for logic and memory, with NMOS memory availability as an option and variants as neccessary for efficient static and dynamic RAM, improved analogue capability and non-volatile storage. • A CMOS process capable of meeting military requirements, almost certainly silicon-on-insulator with CMOS-SOS as the first variant. • Basic bipolar processes for logic and memory with variants for high speed, lower power, high density or improved analogue capability. It is expected that work done during the programme will focus on research into a range of process technologies. The research topics are listed in Table 4. Within the framework of the programme, an effort will be made to strengthen the manufacturing infrastructure in the UK through support of collaborative research projects between device and equipment manufacturers aimed at the evaluation, characterisation and specification of equipment needs from which subsequent development could proceed. This will include support for lithography techniques, including wafer steppers (envisioned as the work horse for the VLSI programme), electron beam machines, ion-beam lithography, among other. Some work will be done in the area of non-silicon technologies, and developments of devices based on III-V semiconductors, optoelectronics and solid state microwave technology will be closely monitored. The funding of the VLSI/CAD programme will be approximately £130 million, with £100 million budgeted for VLSI and the remaining £30 million for CAD.
5. Communication and Infrastructure The Alvey Programme differs from national projects like the Japanese FGCS effort in that no single research establishment such as ICOT will be established. Instead, the Alvey Programme participants will communicate through a communications network including an electronic mail system. The establishment of a communication infrastructure to support the Alvey Programme was given top priority in the Alvey Report. It is t o comprise five main North-Holland
Table 4
Dry etching technology: plasma, reactive ion etching and ion milling for fine patterns in dielectrics, metals, polysilicon and silicides. Dielectric growth, diffusion, ion implantation and annealing: high pressure oxidation and other techniques for enhanced oxidation rate. Thin gate oxides, oxide defects. Shallow (0.25 micron)junctions, halogen amp. flashlamp and other forms of thermal annealing. Dielectric and metal deposition and contact systems: low temperature oxide and nitride deposition, plasma-assisted chemical vapour deposition, organic polymers. Passivation and interlayer dielectrics. Metallisation systems with low contact resistance to shallow layers, high electro-migration resistance and good structural integrity. Refractory metals and silicides and polysilicon. Multilayer and low resistivity interconnect systems. Silicon material: improvements to conventional CVD in uniformity and profile control for submicron epitaxial layers. MBE. Control of impurities in bulk material, particularly oxygen, carbon and heavy metals. Wafer preparation techniques. Silicon-on-insulator: epitaxy on sapphire. Regrowth of polysilicon. Heavy oxygen (or nitrogen) implant and anneal. Use of porous silicon and anodisation. Assessment techniques: impurity, defect and device performance assessment using SIMS, Auger, TEM, STEM or EDAX. Electrical characterisation techniques. Device physics and decive modelling: 2D MOS and bipolar models. Polysilicon emitters including tunnelling. Quantuna effects, mobility models, and recombination mechanisms. Hot electron and 3D structures. Novel devices and small device theory. Process modelling: extension or replacement of SUPREM including very thin oxides and shallowjunctions, oxidation and concentration dependent diffusion, 2D profiles. Dopant dynamics in poly-silicon. Packaging & interconnect: high effiency packaging, improved thermal characteristics, high performance and high density interconnect, both chip to chip and pin-out. The technology necessary to allow wafer scale integration needs to be researched in conjunction with the definition of requirements arising from architecture research.
elements: (1) a Local Area Network, (2) Alvey Network services, (3) Information dissemination and publicity, (4) Other services for Alvey participants, and (5) Infrastructure research projects. Substantial work has been done on the first three of these elements; the first two are dealt with below.
5.1 The Local Area Network Linked via the Public Packet Switched Service to the external Alvey Network, the LAN, as envisioned in the Alvey Report, would provide electronic messaging, diary management, word processing, and a filing FGCSI 75
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system to support the Directorate. Dial-up access will be provided to' the Directorate staff to o f f e r them maximum mobility. In the early phases o f the programme, a mailbox on BT Gold offered a poste restante service for electronic messages sent to the Directorate. At the moment, an electronic mail service, using a GEC 4190 computer installed at the National Physical Laboratory, and linked to the Public Packet Switched service (PSS), communicated with existing mail service computers. The service uses software developed by the academic community on basis of work on network protocols by the Joint Network T e a m , J N T , at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. The academic members of Alvey already have mailboxes o n J N E T , the LAN developed by JNT. As J N E T has a gateway to PSS, the industrial partners in the programme are able to use the mail service by entering via PSS. British Telecom, as the operator of PSS, and GEC as the provider of the computing equipment, have formed a consortium with the software company, Logica Ltd, to implement the mail service. T h e service is u n d e r contract and is not a research project. If Alvey funds permit, a gateway will be constructed to the ESPRIT mail network~ While sufficient for the mail service application, this network is limited to the speed offered by X25 packet-switching, or a maxim u m of 64 Kbit/s, a transmission speed inadequate for real distributed computing, particularly for applications envisioned for the CAD and IKBS programmes. It was therefore decided that a highspeed network will be built separately. Although the two networks will eventually communicate, how this will be done is still uncertain.
5.2 The Alvey Network The Alvey High Speed Network is still u n d e r study, with the results expected in three of four months. D.L.A. Barber, Director of Infrastructure and Communications, described the background for the network as follows: "... it is expected that initial services will be provided by a pilot network based on the very succesful Universe project that demonstrated the use of Local Area Networks joined by satellite links. For a trial period, these satellite links will be replaced by terrestrial Megastream links, and new "bridging" equipment will be developed to join these links to the existing Local A r e a Networks". Project Universe was a £3 million research project jointly carried out by British Telecom, GEC-Marcone Research, Cambridge University, University College 76 I FGCS
London, Loughborough University, and SERC's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire. Logica Ltd participated in the project via an optical fibre link to University College London's premises. In this project, groups of computer units on Cambridge Ring Local Area Networks at seven locations in the UK were linked via the European Space Agency's orbital test satellite (OTS). The object was to determine whether or not it would be possible to achieve the same standard of communication via satellite over large distances as is possible on a Local Area Network. T h e use of capacity on OTS was financed by British Telecom for three hours a day during the duration of the project, which ran from 1979 to the end of 1983. Data was transmitted at 2 Mbit/s using a binary phase shift key modem with half-rate Viterbi encoding to give forward error correction and a useful rate of 1 Mbit/s. The data was structured into packets for transmission over the satellite link, and the transmission was made in time frames of 125 milliseconds each, with a maximum packet size of 2 kbytes. Having reached the end of its functional life, the OTS was decommissioned and Project Universe in its original form was considered to have accomplished its research objectives. The Alvey Directorate was charged with looking into the project and application of the research results. The conclusion, as Alvey Programme Director Brian Oakley was quoted as saying, was negative for the project as a whole: "We see Project Universe as such as dead. The Project Universe Consortium did apply to us for support, but in a way that followed the old Project Universe style. We rejected that". Elements of the project, were, however, considered to be of use, and the study currentlty in progress relies heavily on the experience of the participants in Project Universe. It is also likely that implementation of the network will be done at least in part by Logica Ltd., GEC, and British Telecom, the industrial partners in that project. According to. Peter Campbell-Smith of Logica, Project Universe Manager and one o f the advisors working on the Alvey Network report, "We hope to • be able to set up a high-speed 2 Mbit/s network which will link together the people working on the Alvey Programme. We also hope that the Alvey Network will eventually link up to any ESPRIT network via a gateway between networks. There are. problems in this, however; Britain has a higher speed service offered by British Telecom than other European countries, a 2 Mbit/s switched service. And the exact nature of this network is still to be decided, as it is not clear exactly what the requirements are. However, North-Holland
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the report will be out shortly, and if there are no political or funding problems, certainly within a year it should be possible to have at least a nucleus o f scientists connected on a high-speed network".
6. Comments In a region like the UK, which has felt the pinch of recession economics in so many sectors, it is perhaps to be expected that the activities of the Alvey Commision should be watched with critical, and sometimes jealous, eyes. Mrs. Thatcher's government has allotted £200 million to the Alvey Programme, a sum nearly matched by industry, which is contributing another £150 million. It is the responsibility o f the Alvey Directorate to allocate those funds, choosing the project descriptions submitted by commercial and academic researchers which are deemed most likely to meet the objectives of the programme: these projects must offer a strong promise of application, the possibility of exploitation within Britain for her gain. As is the case in Japan, many policy makers in Britain are convinced that only by shifting their focus from industrial expansion to the development of advanced computer-based information systems can they recapture the economic prosperity they once knew.
6.1 Hampering Conditions It is generally recognized that Great Britain has developed some social conventions and institutions which h a m p e r a ready swing from one area of endeavor to another. Among those often cited are her style of class management and her trade unions which are powerful and effective in protecting the interests of workers in the established industries. She has a system o f social benefits which is expensive, unwieldy to admimister, and difficult to change. She also has a singular tradition of fostering research which is developed elsewhere; the discoveries made in the laboratories and universities o f England are all too often exploited outside the country's boundaries - so that the very climate of vigorous inquiry she encourages has often served only to widen, rather than lessen, the gap between Britain and the nations with which she competes for markets.
6.2 Unequal Chances? T h e Alvey Programme has attempted to build in restrictions to prevent the latter from happening. Funding is allocated t o projects to support research North-Holland
according to the following principle: academic institutions receive 100% funding; commercial organisations 50%. Each acaderrfic institution must, however, have a commercial partner. T h e reasoning behind this division of resources is clear: Britain's policy makers want r e s e a r c h results which have market potential, and this is one way to ensure that that will be the case. Some academics, however, fret that the necessity to accept a commercial partner means that they will be forced to focus on research which can be exploited as quickly as possible, ruling out the possibility of long-range research objectivites. And there are complaints from imiustry as well. One protest often heard is that the requirement that 50% of the funding must be supplied by the firm concerned means that only the larger, wealthier, established electronics companies can afford to participate. The old giants, it is somedmes suggested, will continue to hold the field, and the young, new companies with few resources will be excluded. The Alvey Directorate itself has also come u n d e r fire. The Directors are researches and policy makers who have held positions in industry, in the Department of Industry, and in the Science and Engineering Research Council. Their salaries are paid by the firms and organisations by which they are employed. It has been hinted that these organisations will have an "inside edge" when the allocations are made.
6.3 Replies How have these charges been answered? T h e Alvey Directors are willing enough to offer explanations when they have one, and to admit it when they do not. One has only to visit the Millbank Tower near Westminster in London and to go through a security check similar to the ticket collection at the London tube stations to get the impression that an atmosphere of portent - and self-importance - is lacking. Of the latter charge, for example, D. Thomas, head of the IKBS programme, said, "The answer to those companies that feel themselves disadvantaged is 'get your blokes in here!' We've hayer refused any company. If they want to send their people here, we'd be pretty pleased to have them. T h e people here are on rotation; they are here for two years. O f course, no one has been here for that long yet, but it is quite conceivable that the c o m p a n y concerned will say, 'we've had our man in there for two years, and he's learned enough and now we really want him back to do some management at the home base'." He went on to say, "There are criticisms from small companies which say that can't afford the 50%. But FGCS I 77
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if, for example, a small company wants to get into expert system research, t h e y can find a university research d e p a r t m e n t for a partner. Fifty percent of the research can be done by the university, which is funded at 100% and thay can do 50% o f the research, which is f u n d e d at 50% - which means that in the end they only pay 25% of the costs. I think that's good value. And there is room in the Alvey Programme for small projects as well as large ones. It's also not true that academics are excluded from long-terms research. I take a particular interest in this, with my background. All they really have to do is to convince us that their work is really long-term, so long-term that i n d u s t r y is not at all interested in it, and they will still get:funded by SERC. I f you want to work on some kind o f esoteric cognitive science which you claim will be extremely important to computer science in fifty years time, you can still get funding for that. If, on the orher hand, you come to us with an idea for a new piece of hardware and you want to build a prototype for that which will be working within a year, we may well say, 'If you can't find a commercial partner willing to market this, then we don't believe your ideas are good'. I don't think long-term research will suffer. What is certainly true is that because of the Alvey programme, the
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amount of funds which are available to the information technology community in universities has doubled. And that is going to mean some major changes in the future!". That indeed appears to be the case, as the first Alvey projects are currently being announced and will be reported upon in this publication. J.M. This article was written on basis of information provided by the Alvey Directorate and the followingdocumentation: "A Programme for Advanced Information Technology. The Report of the AlveyCommittee",HMSO, 1982. "AlveyMMI Strategy",AlveyDirectorate,January 1984. "Alvey Software Engineering - A Strategy Overview", Alvey Directorate, November 1983. "AlveyVLSI and CAD Strategy",AlveyDirectorate, December 1983. "IntelligentKnowledgeBased Systems,A Programmefor Action in the UK", AlveyDirectorate, n.d. Alvey News, issues 1-4, IEE and the British Computer Society, September 1983- April 1984. "The AlveyProgramme of Advanced Information Technology: Guidance Notes for Applicants",the AlveyDirectorate, February 1984. Further information is available from The Alvey Directorate, Millbank Tower, Millbank,London SWl 4QU, U.K. Telephone: (01)211-3311.
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1. Introduction As was the case for similar initiatives elsewhere, the catalyst for Great Britain,s new information technology research policy arrived in an innocuous enough form: an invitation to attend the symposium in Japan in October 1981 on Japan's FGCS project. A team o f scientists and government officials, led by the head of the information technology division of the Department of Industry, attended this symposium. Upon their return, the UK delegation expressed their reactions to what they had seen and heard in no uncertain terms: what the Japanese were planning to undertake constituted a major competitive threat to industry in the UK and elsewhere. The scale and cohesiveness of the FGCS programme outlined was impressive. Moreover, the team felt that other nations, led by the US, would respond to this challenge, creating an equal if not greater degree of competition for UK industry. T h e delegation reported their findings to a conference in London in January 1982 which was attended by a representative cross-section of industrialists and other experts. Nor were the conference participants insensitive to the delegates' message: an urgent study was called for to investigate the opportunities for and obstacles in the way of cooperative research efforts in information technology in the UK, and a programme of action was outlined, organised by a group assembled by the Science and Engineering Research Council (SERC). A twelve-member committee made up of representatives of the major British computer companies (e.g., General Electric Co. (GEC) of London, Plessey Co., Ltd, International Computers Ltd. (ICL)) plus participants from the Ministry of Defense and SERC, was appointed by the Department of Industry. Chaired by J o h n Alvey, a man with an impressive scientific North-Holland
career i n government research institutes who has since become Director of Research at British Telecom, the Committee was charged with undertaking this study.
2. The Alvey Report Their conclusions became the Alvey Report, a 70page document presented to Kenneth Baker, the Minister for Technology, in August 1982 and subsequently presented to and accepted by the House of Commons on 28 April 1983. It r e c o m m e n d e d a cooperative programme of research involving all sections of British information technology. Among its recommendations were: • to establish a national programme for advanced Information Technology (IT) research to cost £350 million over five years. Two-thirds of the direct costs of this programme were to be borne by the government, with industry providing the remainder (Costs of implementing research results as marketable products were to be borne solely by industry.); • tO encourage collaborative efforts between industry, the academic sector, and other research organisati0ns, with a view to the widest possible exploitation of the research results; • to distribute funding in the following way: £57 million would go to support research and training in academic institutions. This support would be 100% government-funded. The rest of the research would be carried out by industry, and those projects with wide applicability were to receive 90% government funding, with other projects receiving 50% (This proposal was later rejected by the Thatcher government, which felt that there would be greater likelihood of exploitation if all industrial research were funded on a 50-50 basis. Academic research did receive 100% funding, however.); FGCSI 69
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• to focus on four key "enabling technologies": Software Engineering, Very Large Scale Integration (VSLI), Man-Machine Interfaces (MMI), and Intelligent Knowledge Based Systems (IKBS) (These four enabling technologies will be elaborated upon below.); • to focus on pre-competitive activities, i.e., basic research and the design of tools and a communication infrastructure to link researchers. "Capability demonstrators" should be emphasized to test the emerging technology and assess its potential commercial application (Although not specifically identified as such in the Alvey Report, the infrastructure and communications aspects have been recognised as sufficiently important to merit the status of a fifth area of activity, including research, and are likewise treated below.); • to emphasize education and training to provide h u m a n resources to mount the technical programmes, particularly in IKBS, but also in software and MMI; • to operate the programme as a UK effort. Participation by non-UK multinationals should be permitted only when they are able to contribute a particular asset to the programme, where the results of their involvement will be available to benefit UK industry as a whole, and where the relevant technical information will not leak from the UK. Full exploitation by UK industry should be encouraged and at as early a stage as possible; • to establish a Directorate within the Department of Industry to implement the programme. Headed by a Director who is accountable for his broad strategy and overall operations via DOI control machinery, the Directorate should nonetheless have the necessary powers to act speedily and flexibly (The Alvey Directorate is likewise dealt with at greater length below). The Alvey Report was widely circulated in the UK and its arguments found general approval and acceptance within British industry, without doubt eager for a solution to the problems of their eroding markets and aware of the potential offered by Information Technology. As the Alvey Report itself cites, current growth in the area on the world market is in the order of 10 percent per annum. T h e authors Of the report go on to say: "The issue before us is stark. We can either seek to be at the leadingedge of these technologies; or we can aim to rely upon imported technology; or we can opt out of the race. The latter we do not regard as a valid option. Nor is reliance upon imported technology practical as a 701 FGCS
general strategy, though we cannot be completely self-reliant either. "The only sensible option, in our view, is to share in the future growth and development of the world IT sector, by building up our technological strengths in specific targetted priority areas, which will maximise our prospects of exploiting the opportunities available".
3. The Alvey Directorate Based on the assumption that any research would be done by organisations capable of using and exploiting the results, the authors of the Alvey Report recommended that the Directorate overseeing the programme be limited in size to about 15 members to avoidthe unwieldiness of a top-heavy organisation. It was expected that the programme would be executed through other organisations~ The Programme Director was to be someone with a proven track record for programme management in information technology, with a demonstrated ability to work with and through a wide range of other organisafions. The Alvey Report recommended that the P r o g r a m m e Director be given a fixed term contract for five years and that his position be graded sufficiently high to permit him direct access to Ministers. The position of Director o f the Alvey Programme was assumed by the former Director ofSERC i n J u n e 1983. He is accountable to a Steering Committee to which his overall strategy and plans are submitted for approval. Assisting him is the Deputy Director, four division Directors and two more Directors, in charge of Administration and for Infrastructure and Communications. These Directors are "on loan" from the institutions by which they are employed, and their salaries are paid by these organisations. The responsibilities of the Alvey Directorate include drawing up contract specifications and awarding contracts, arranging for the monitoring of projects, dissemination of the results to promote commercial exploitation as quickly and as competitively as possible.
4. The Enabling Technologies Enabling technologies are the priority areas identified by the Alvey Report which are considered neccessary for managing the growing complexity of future I T products and handling the highly complex interactions which will be required of future computing systems. As mentioned above, four main enabling technologies are seen as essential to progress in the North-Holland
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field (Table 1). Although these areas overlap in many ways, for the purposes of simplification and organisation, they are treated as separate units within the Alvey strategy documents and are superficially organised as separate elements within the Alvey Programme.
Table l 1. So]-tware Engineenng, the efficient specification and generation of the instructions for the machines of the future. 2. Man-Machine Inter]aces. It is felt that commercial success will come to those developers who make a point of ensuring that their complex (or simple) products are acceptable to their users. Interface instruments include visual, speech and touch input/output devices. 3. Intelligent Knowledge Based Systems. More powerful information processing systems featuring more effective transfer of human intelligence and knowledge to the computer are emphasized, as are computer systemsthat are easier to build and to use. 4 VLS1 developments. Very Large Scale Integration of circuits on silicon will be the basis for the hardware which requires the efficient interconnection of very large numbers of logic elements.
4.1 SoftwareEngineering Acknowledging the fact that "the UK is good at software but must develop better tools if it is to stay competitive", the Alvey Report goes on to state the goal of this programme in terms which are as unclouded as they are ambitious: "The strategic objective proposed in this area is that the UK should become a world leader in this Software Engineering technology by the end of the 80s". T h e Strategy Overview for the programme puts it this way: "The programme will set out to establish tools and methods necessary for the production of high quality, cost effect software of world-leading standard". T h e long-term objective of the Software Engineering Programme is the development of Information Systems Factories (ISF) by the end of the 1980s. ISF is defined in the Alvey Report as "a computer system, both hardware and software, which provides an integrated set of tools for producing IT systems using software engineering techniques .... IT systems produced through the ISFs will meet the parallel requirements of efficient production and operation, of improved reliability and performance, which the competitive market of the 1990s will impose. An ISF will contain subsystems for specification and prototyping, to ensure the cornNorth-Holland
pleteness and consistency of systems design and leading to automatic software p ~ u c t i o n ; programming support, based on a methodology for the entire life-cycle of systems development; computer-aided design for VLSI; a database or knowledge base of available, reusable hardware and software components, communications facilities to link collaborative development teams on both local and wide area networks". T h e Software Engineering Programme emphasises three areas of activity: the rapid exploitation of mature formal methods, the industrialisation of promising methods so that they can be exploited in the near future, and fundamental research to provide more powerful methods in the long term. The two major goals identified in the Alvey Software Engineering Programme Strategy are: • improved quality, i.e,, satisfying criteria such as performance, reliability, security, on-schedule delivery, and meeting the needs to the user; • increased productivity, i.e. reducing cost, not just of the development, but of the lifecycle as a whole, including maintenance and future evolution. The demand for reliable software, defined as the probability of failure-free operation for a given time period in a specific environment, has increased and will continue to increase as companies which are prepared to provide warranties on their software gain competitive advantages. There may be serious repercussions to the use of inadequately designed software, such as the failure of large firms as a result of unreliable business software or loss of life due to software failures in avionic systems or major chemical processing plants. These kinds o f failures could bring about massive public reactions against the use of computers, in the opinion of the Alvey Directorate, which could have very serious consequences for all industrialised countries. T h e old ad hoc methods of producing applicationspecific software must be changed if the demand for software is to be met. This demand calls for an acceleration of research activities and of the evaluation and real-life application of research results. It is expected that there will be a close interrelationship between the evaluation and production steps in the Software Engineering Programme, with, for example, the results of technique evaluation being fed back into the development of handbooks to guide production and management; and cost and quality considerations and model validation exercises will refine the original models of reliability and the development process. There appears to be a strong degree of agreement FGCSI 71
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between industry, government, and 'the academic community regarding the m a i n directions the programme should follow. These are:
Exploitation It is generally agreed that software quality and productivity can be improved in the short term by encouraging acceptance and use of tools available now, such as data dictionary systems, test harnesses, project databases, etc. This can be encouraged by the application of appropriate standards to tools, the investment of capital for equipment and training, and the education of both management and software staff.
Integration Project Support Environments (PSE) must be inte-. grated to contain a compatible'set of specification, design, programming, building, and testing tools supporting a development methodology that covers the entire life cycle, together with management control tools and procedures, all using a coordinated and consistent project database. A fully integrated PSE is the Information Systems Factory, the focus of this programme, which is a long-term objectiveexpected not earlier than the end of the decade.
Innovation Although it is impossible to specify now what kinds of approaches will be selected for support and eventual testing on life-size projects, it seems likely that successful approaches will possess the following: • formal, rigorous methods of specification of requirements and techniques to express designs and determine how far they meet their specifications; • methods of structuring software or hardware system components for wide reuse; • methods of measuring and predicting levels of productivity and quality, particularly reliability; • potential for examination of the software production process in its industrial context so that this process can be better described and modelled and can provide a sound basis for the construction of advanced management tools and techniques. The Software Engineering Programme will increasingly cooperate with and integrate aspects of the other main Al,~ey strategy areas, in particular CAD for VLSI, high resolution displays (MMI), and expert systems (IKBS).
4.2 Man-Machine Interfaces (MMI) Deliberately selecting an acronym to represent it which encompasses both the concept of Man-Machi72 I FGCS
ne Interaction and of Man-Machine Interfaces, the Alvey MMI programme is based on the notion that, as the Alvey Report puts it, "commercial success will come to those who are making sophisticated products truly acceptable to their users". Major areas of focus within the programme will be Human Interface and Displays; the programme will also focus on technologies that support the user interface, including image analysis and speech processing, grouped in MMI documents under the term "Pattern Analysis". MMI work will be done by researchers from many fields, including psychology, mathematics, organisational theory, and computer science. These researchers will be charged with identifying the needs, conventions and skills in successful human communications, as well as the modes (text, speech, images, etc.) which are most effective in user interfaces. In order to design systems which operate as effective consultants or tutors, attempts will be made to determine what makes human experts effective at communicating their expertise. Within the programme, the intention is to deemphasize physical ergonomics. According to Chris Barrow, MMI Director, it is generally felt that adequate research has been done in the past in this area, and that cognitive ergonomics must be stressed instead. Among other techniques, this will be done by constructing "models of users" and by quantifying the success of systems by, e.g., measuring user error rates. "Most systems in the past have been menudriven, with the computer asking the questions; new systems will use a conversational mode, with humans asking the questions", Barrow said. "Many companies in the past supplied equipment, the consequences of which they had no idea, but this is changing. As an example of good coming from evil, the Three-Mile Island disaster did a great deal to boost this field, by drawing attention to the questions of social liability". It is not, however, the intention of the Alvey MMI Programme to deal with larger social issues, such as effects on employment; instead it is hoped that the European Economic Community's ESPRIT programme will focus some attention on these questions. The objectives of the MMI programme are "to raise the level of UK user interface design, in terms of innovation and design methodology, so that the industry can compete effectively in world markets, and to improve UK capabilities in pattern analysis to make possible the use of advanced speech and image techniques in the user interface. For Human Interface, the key areas of work as identified in the MMI Strategy Document are given here in Table 2. North-Holland
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Table 2 User Interface design
• Interactive techniques (especially ways of using new workstation architectures and input devices): • Interface to IKBS (both for the end user and for the interface between the expert and the knowledge base); • Exemplar projects (or projects demonstrating the use of MMI in specific applications); • Integrating methods for combining two or more applications of interactive capabilities; and • Technology evaluation, including analysisof alternative hardware and software architectures for interactive systems. Human Factors
• Cognitive processes of the individual IT user; • Evaluation techniques for objective measurement of human-computer performance (such as the measurement of error rates mentioned above); • UsabiIitycharacterstics and determinants (such as training, environment, hardware and software design and user support); • Person-to-Person interaction via advanced IT; and • Organisational consequences of IT (i.e., the tools and techniques for facilitating and evaluating the use of IT by groups of users. Computer conferencing systemslike the COM system developed at Stockholm University have yielded valuable experience in this area.) Design Methodology
• Use of models in MMI design, including user's models, models of application environments, systemarchitecture models, etc.; • Design tools and techniques for simulation and evaluation; • Design guidelines and procedures for hardware and software construction and for the application of human factor research; • The design process,or investigating methods of improving the MMI design process; and • Design case studies and worked examples.
MMI research in the area of displays, an important field which has not been dealt with in the ESPRIT programme plans, will focus primarily on developing flat-panel displays meeting industry's requirements for high-volume interactive products. These requirements will include low cost, large area (at least A4) and high resolution range, as well as interactive properties. Investigation of integrated input devices (e.g. touch sensitivity) will also be explored. Pattern Analysis, including speech and image processing, provides the technologies for translation between human-oriented representations of data (text, pictures, speech, etc.) and machine-oriented North-Holland
representations, opening up new approaches to human-computer interaction. Research into image processing will include image enhancement, motion analysis, image parametrisation (obtaining characterisations of the local shape of grey-level surfaces, multi-sensor fusion, optimisation of hierarchy design. Speech processing research will include speech recognition and speech synthesis. As the objectives of the Alvey Programme in general stress the exploitability of products, it has been recognized that much MMI work will have to be application-specific. Likely key market areas include office automation, factory automation, computer aided design (CAD), process control, and software engineering, Regarding the relative general commercial exploitability of the MMI programme, a recent Alvey-sponsored survey of 110 major IT companies in the UK in both defense and nondefense work identified about 650 researchers in MMI areas. IN UK universities, there are a number of bodies which fund work in their own particular area of MMI. Previous to the establishment of the Alvey MMI programme, few opportunities existed to mount multi-disciplinary projects and to achieve cross-fertilisation or avoid duplication. It is felt that the MMI programme will bring about a muchneeded degree of coordination and that MMI experience will become increasingly valuable as competition for IT products increases.
4.3 Intelligent Knowledge Based Systems (IKBS) IKBS is defined in the IKBS Architecture Study as "semi-intelligent systems for carrying out a single complex task. This implies w o r k i n g with a large, incomplete, uncer~in, and rapidly changing knowledge store, use of inferential procedures for applying this knowledge in reacting to varied and unreliable inputs in a changing environment, and the use of sophisticated and flexible control mechanisms". Sometimes described by insiders as a kind of euphemism for artificial intelligence and expert systems, IKBS may be applicable in areas of human thought and activity ranging from medical diagnosis to complex engineering design, from oil technology to agriculture, from military strategy to citizen's advice. Envisioned by the authors o f the Alvey Report as consisting of a user interface connected by an inference engine to a knowledge base, with the entire structure supported by an appropriate virtual machine, other areas of potential application include scientific diagnosis, database questioning, teaching FGCSI 73
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basic skills, document retrieval, office scheduling, robot management, picture matching, message interpretation, p r o g r a m m e drafting, technical manual production, industrial process control and warehouse packing. The study upon which the programme is based was prepared by a Study Group jointly sponsored by the Department of Industry and the Science and Engineering Research Council u n d e r the Chaimanship of J o h n Taylor of the Admiralty Surface Weapons Establishment. Carried out over a period of six months by a team of researchers from universities, industry a n d government laboratories, the study resulted in a report which proposed an IKBS programme u n d e r three main headings: (1) Research and Development (dealt with below), (2) Awareness and Marketing, and (3) Infrastructure. Preliminary budgetary estimates indicate that a programme o f the scale described would cost some £30 million over five years. T h e Research and Development component is subdivided into five subheadings: • "Show me" projects: demonstrations of existing IKBS technology; • Short-term development projects: to produce marketable products in three to four years; • D e m o n s t r a t o r projects: complete prototype systems embodying new research results; • Research themes: long-term directed research on selected topics o f importance to future IKBS technology; • General research: portfolio of quality, speculative research proposals. A start has been made in searching within UK industry for suitable "Show Me" projects. Suitable projects will be used as case studies in the Awareness Programme. Recognising the lack of manpower in the area, the Alvey IKBS Programme will focus considerable attention on training and attracting people to IKBS-related fields. It has been estimated that the n u m b e r o f individuals dedicated to research in this area will have to be tripled. Because o f this shortage, more demonstrator projects are presently being f u n d e d or considered for funding than applications or research projects at the m o m e n t within the IKBS programme. T h e more concrete demonstrator projects, which involve industry-led collaborative R & D, are aimed at building complete prototypes of possible future systems requiring substantial R & D progress. It is hoped that individuals who are currently in I T applications or are still studying will be sufficiently attracted by the notions, represented in the demonstrations to enter research. 74 I FGCS
Nine major research themes have been oudined as medium to long-term directed research goals (see Table 3). Other critical areas which will receive attention within the IKBS programme include programming languages and hardware standards.
Table 3 1. Declarativelanguages (or languagesin whichthe pro~ gramme is a description of the result rather than a s~cification of the steps to be performed to calculateit): 2. 16aralletarchitectures; 3. Intelligentdatabase systems; (These three themes taken together will provide the basis for what is most frequendy compared with the Japanese Fifth Generation Coml~uterSystem) 4. Expert systems; 5. InieUigentfront ends 6. Inference: 7. Natural language; 8. Image interpretation; 9. IntelligentComputer-aidedinstruction
4.4 VLSI Developments Very large scale integration is seen as vital to the development of advanced IT products. T h e Alvey VLSI programme will focus a great deal o f attention on the use of computer-aided design (CAD) to design advanced circuits, making the development of improved CAD tools a major part of the programme. The development of these tools and VLSI techniques are and will be increasingly interrelated, and the Alvey Report sees the development o f VLSI technology as crucial to the evolution of all the other recommended technologies: speech and picture processing for man/machine interfaces and advanced processors for intelligent knowledge-based systems. Other interrelationships in the programme likewise become obvious; for example, the ability to build in knowledge will create the need for larger and faster systems which will in turn create a d e m a n d for software engineering, and so on. The objective of the programme is to advance British VLSI technology to the point that it will be possible to manufacture and test silicon chips that are approximately one centimeter square and contain approximately one million logic gates capable of one nanosecond switching delays by the end of the decade. It is expected that the project goal will be achieved in steps with, for example, 1.5 micron geometry circuits designed as an intermediate product, within the first two years. Chip demonstrators, North-Holland
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selected on basis of their applicability to IT products, will be created during the course of the programme to illustrate the advances in VSLI technology and CAD tools. Fabrication processes being considered for support within the Alvey Programme include: • A basic CMOS process for logic and memory, with NMOS memory availability as an option and variants as neccessary for efficient static and dynamic RAM, improved analogue capability and non-volatile storage. • A CMOS process capable of meeting military requirements, almost certainly silicon-on-insulator with CMOS-SOS as the first variant. • Basic bipolar processes for logic and memory with variants for high speed, lower power, high density or improved analogue capability. It is expected that work done during the programme will focus on research into a range of process technologies. The research topics are listed in Table 4. Within the framework of the programme, an effort will be made to strengthen the manufacturing infrastructure in the UK through support of collaborative research projects between device and equipment manufacturers aimed at the evaluation, characterisation and specification of equipment needs from which subsequent development could proceed. This will include support for lithography techniques, including wafer steppers (envisioned as the work horse for the VLSI programme), electron beam machines, ion-beam lithography, among other. Some work will be done in the area of non-silicon technologies, and developments of devices based on III-V semiconductors, optoelectronics and solid state microwave technology will be closely monitored. The funding of the VLSI/CAD programme will be approximately £130 million, with £100 million budgeted for VLSI and the remaining £30 million for CAD.
5. Communication and Infrastructure The Alvey Programme differs from national projects like the Japanese FGCS effort in that no single research establishment such as ICOT will be established. Instead, the Alvey Programme participants will communicate through a communications network including an electronic mail system. The establishment of a communication infrastructure to support the Alvey Programme was given top priority in the Alvey Report. It is t o comprise five main North-Holland
Table 4
Dry etching technology: plasma, reactive ion etching and ion milling for fine patterns in dielectrics, metals, polysilicon and silicides. Dielectric growth, diffusion, ion implantation and annealing: high pressure oxidation and other techniques for enhanced oxidation rate. Thin gate oxides, oxide defects. Shallow (0.25 micron)junctions, halogen amp. flashlamp and other forms of thermal annealing. Dielectric and metal deposition and contact systems: low temperature oxide and nitride deposition, plasma-assisted chemical vapour deposition, organic polymers. Passivation and interlayer dielectrics. Metallisation systems with low contact resistance to shallow layers, high electro-migration resistance and good structural integrity. Refractory metals and silicides and polysilicon. Multilayer and low resistivity interconnect systems. Silicon material: improvements to conventional CVD in uniformity and profile control for submicron epitaxial layers. MBE. Control of impurities in bulk material, particularly oxygen, carbon and heavy metals. Wafer preparation techniques. Silicon-on-insulator: epitaxy on sapphire. Regrowth of polysilicon. Heavy oxygen (or nitrogen) implant and anneal. Use of porous silicon and anodisation. Assessment techniques: impurity, defect and device performance assessment using SIMS, Auger, TEM, STEM or EDAX. Electrical characterisation techniques. Device physics and decive modelling: 2D MOS and bipolar models. Polysilicon emitters including tunnelling. Quantuna effects, mobility models, and recombination mechanisms. Hot electron and 3D structures. Novel devices and small device theory. Process modelling: extension or replacement of SUPREM including very thin oxides and shallowjunctions, oxidation and concentration dependent diffusion, 2D profiles. Dopant dynamics in poly-silicon. Packaging & interconnect: high effiency packaging, improved thermal characteristics, high performance and high density interconnect, both chip to chip and pin-out. The technology necessary to allow wafer scale integration needs to be researched in conjunction with the definition of requirements arising from architecture research.
elements: (1) a Local Area Network, (2) Alvey Network services, (3) Information dissemination and publicity, (4) Other services for Alvey participants, and (5) Infrastructure research projects. Substantial work has been done on the first three of these elements; the first two are dealt with below.
5.1 The Local Area Network Linked via the Public Packet Switched Service to the external Alvey Network, the LAN, as envisioned in the Alvey Report, would provide electronic messaging, diary management, word processing, and a filing FGCSI 75
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system to support the Directorate. Dial-up access will be provided to' the Directorate staff to o f f e r them maximum mobility. In the early phases o f the programme, a mailbox on BT Gold offered a poste restante service for electronic messages sent to the Directorate. At the moment, an electronic mail service, using a GEC 4190 computer installed at the National Physical Laboratory, and linked to the Public Packet Switched service (PSS), communicated with existing mail service computers. The service uses software developed by the academic community on basis of work on network protocols by the Joint Network T e a m , J N T , at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. The academic members of Alvey already have mailboxes o n J N E T , the LAN developed by JNT. As J N E T has a gateway to PSS, the industrial partners in the programme are able to use the mail service by entering via PSS. British Telecom, as the operator of PSS, and GEC as the provider of the computing equipment, have formed a consortium with the software company, Logica Ltd, to implement the mail service. T h e service is u n d e r contract and is not a research project. If Alvey funds permit, a gateway will be constructed to the ESPRIT mail network~ While sufficient for the mail service application, this network is limited to the speed offered by X25 packet-switching, or a maxim u m of 64 Kbit/s, a transmission speed inadequate for real distributed computing, particularly for applications envisioned for the CAD and IKBS programmes. It was therefore decided that a highspeed network will be built separately. Although the two networks will eventually communicate, how this will be done is still uncertain.
5.2 The Alvey Network The Alvey High Speed Network is still u n d e r study, with the results expected in three of four months. D.L.A. Barber, Director of Infrastructure and Communications, described the background for the network as follows: "... it is expected that initial services will be provided by a pilot network based on the very succesful Universe project that demonstrated the use of Local Area Networks joined by satellite links. For a trial period, these satellite links will be replaced by terrestrial Megastream links, and new "bridging" equipment will be developed to join these links to the existing Local A r e a Networks". Project Universe was a £3 million research project jointly carried out by British Telecom, GEC-Marcone Research, Cambridge University, University College 76 I FGCS
London, Loughborough University, and SERC's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire. Logica Ltd participated in the project via an optical fibre link to University College London's premises. In this project, groups of computer units on Cambridge Ring Local Area Networks at seven locations in the UK were linked via the European Space Agency's orbital test satellite (OTS). The object was to determine whether or not it would be possible to achieve the same standard of communication via satellite over large distances as is possible on a Local Area Network. T h e use of capacity on OTS was financed by British Telecom for three hours a day during the duration of the project, which ran from 1979 to the end of 1983. Data was transmitted at 2 Mbit/s using a binary phase shift key modem with half-rate Viterbi encoding to give forward error correction and a useful rate of 1 Mbit/s. The data was structured into packets for transmission over the satellite link, and the transmission was made in time frames of 125 milliseconds each, with a maximum packet size of 2 kbytes. Having reached the end of its functional life, the OTS was decommissioned and Project Universe in its original form was considered to have accomplished its research objectives. The Alvey Directorate was charged with looking into the project and application of the research results. The conclusion, as Alvey Programme Director Brian Oakley was quoted as saying, was negative for the project as a whole: "We see Project Universe as such as dead. The Project Universe Consortium did apply to us for support, but in a way that followed the old Project Universe style. We rejected that". Elements of the project, were, however, considered to be of use, and the study currentlty in progress relies heavily on the experience of the participants in Project Universe. It is also likely that implementation of the network will be done at least in part by Logica Ltd., GEC, and British Telecom, the industrial partners in that project. According to. Peter Campbell-Smith of Logica, Project Universe Manager and one o f the advisors working on the Alvey Network report, "We hope to • be able to set up a high-speed 2 Mbit/s network which will link together the people working on the Alvey Programme. We also hope that the Alvey Network will eventually link up to any ESPRIT network via a gateway between networks. There are. problems in this, however; Britain has a higher speed service offered by British Telecom than other European countries, a 2 Mbit/s switched service. And the exact nature of this network is still to be decided, as it is not clear exactly what the requirements are. However, North-Holland
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the report will be out shortly, and if there are no political or funding problems, certainly within a year it should be possible to have at least a nucleus o f scientists connected on a high-speed network".
6. Comments In a region like the UK, which has felt the pinch of recession economics in so many sectors, it is perhaps to be expected that the activities of the Alvey Commision should be watched with critical, and sometimes jealous, eyes. Mrs. Thatcher's government has allotted £200 million to the Alvey Programme, a sum nearly matched by industry, which is contributing another £150 million. It is the responsibility o f the Alvey Directorate to allocate those funds, choosing the project descriptions submitted by commercial and academic researchers which are deemed most likely to meet the objectives of the programme: these projects must offer a strong promise of application, the possibility of exploitation within Britain for her gain. As is the case in Japan, many policy makers in Britain are convinced that only by shifting their focus from industrial expansion to the development of advanced computer-based information systems can they recapture the economic prosperity they once knew.
6.1 Hampering Conditions It is generally recognized that Great Britain has developed some social conventions and institutions which h a m p e r a ready swing from one area of endeavor to another. Among those often cited are her style of class management and her trade unions which are powerful and effective in protecting the interests of workers in the established industries. She has a system o f social benefits which is expensive, unwieldy to admimister, and difficult to change. She also has a singular tradition of fostering research which is developed elsewhere; the discoveries made in the laboratories and universities o f England are all too often exploited outside the country's boundaries - so that the very climate of vigorous inquiry she encourages has often served only to widen, rather than lessen, the gap between Britain and the nations with which she competes for markets.
6.2 Unequal Chances? T h e Alvey Programme has attempted to build in restrictions to prevent the latter from happening. Funding is allocated t o projects to support research North-Holland
according to the following principle: academic institutions receive 100% funding; commercial organisations 50%. Each acaderrfic institution must, however, have a commercial partner. T h e reasoning behind this division of resources is clear: Britain's policy makers want r e s e a r c h results which have market potential, and this is one way to ensure that that will be the case. Some academics, however, fret that the necessity to accept a commercial partner means that they will be forced to focus on research which can be exploited as quickly as possible, ruling out the possibility of long-range research objectivites. And there are complaints from imiustry as well. One protest often heard is that the requirement that 50% of the funding must be supplied by the firm concerned means that only the larger, wealthier, established electronics companies can afford to participate. The old giants, it is somedmes suggested, will continue to hold the field, and the young, new companies with few resources will be excluded. The Alvey Directorate itself has also come u n d e r fire. The Directors are researches and policy makers who have held positions in industry, in the Department of Industry, and in the Science and Engineering Research Council. Their salaries are paid by the firms and organisations by which they are employed. It has been hinted that these organisations will have an "inside edge" when the allocations are made.
6.3 Replies How have these charges been answered? T h e Alvey Directors are willing enough to offer explanations when they have one, and to admit it when they do not. One has only to visit the Millbank Tower near Westminster in London and to go through a security check similar to the ticket collection at the London tube stations to get the impression that an atmosphere of portent - and self-importance - is lacking. Of the latter charge, for example, D. Thomas, head of the IKBS programme, said, "The answer to those companies that feel themselves disadvantaged is 'get your blokes in here!' We've hayer refused any company. If they want to send their people here, we'd be pretty pleased to have them. T h e people here are on rotation; they are here for two years. O f course, no one has been here for that long yet, but it is quite conceivable that the c o m p a n y concerned will say, 'we've had our man in there for two years, and he's learned enough and now we really want him back to do some management at the home base'." He went on to say, "There are criticisms from small companies which say that can't afford the 50%. But FGCS I 77
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if, for example, a small company wants to get into expert system research, t h e y can find a university research d e p a r t m e n t for a partner. Fifty percent of the research can be done by the university, which is funded at 100% and thay can do 50% o f the research, which is f u n d e d at 50% - which means that in the end they only pay 25% of the costs. I think that's good value. And there is room in the Alvey Programme for small projects as well as large ones. It's also not true that academics are excluded from long-terms research. I take a particular interest in this, with my background. All they really have to do is to convince us that their work is really long-term, so long-term that i n d u s t r y is not at all interested in it, and they will still get:funded by SERC. I f you want to work on some kind o f esoteric cognitive science which you claim will be extremely important to computer science in fifty years time, you can still get funding for that. If, on the orher hand, you come to us with an idea for a new piece of hardware and you want to build a prototype for that which will be working within a year, we may well say, 'If you can't find a commercial partner willing to market this, then we don't believe your ideas are good'. I don't think long-term research will suffer. What is certainly true is that because of the Alvey programme, the
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amount of funds which are available to the information technology community in universities has doubled. And that is going to mean some major changes in the future!". That indeed appears to be the case, as the first Alvey projects are currently being announced and will be reported upon in this publication. J.M. This article was written on basis of information provided by the Alvey Directorate and the followingdocumentation: "A Programme for Advanced Information Technology. The Report of the AlveyCommittee",HMSO, 1982. "AlveyMMI Strategy",AlveyDirectorate,January 1984. "Alvey Software Engineering - A Strategy Overview", Alvey Directorate, November 1983. "AlveyVLSI and CAD Strategy",AlveyDirectorate, December 1983. "IntelligentKnowledgeBased Systems,A Programmefor Action in the UK", AlveyDirectorate, n.d. Alvey News, issues 1-4, IEE and the British Computer Society, September 1983- April 1984. "The AlveyProgramme of Advanced Information Technology: Guidance Notes for Applicants",the AlveyDirectorate, February 1984. Further information is available from The Alvey Directorate, Millbank Tower, Millbank,London SWl 4QU, U.K. Telephone: (01)211-3311.
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